A general warning on this day of #HarryandMeghan fuss: take everything you read that comes from the UK national press with a pinch of salt. They are not impartial or honest observers in this; they are determined to break this royal marriage to a woman of colour... (Thread)
We are told that the couple refuses to accept legitimate scrutiny, but what they have faced has not been legitimate. It has been a sustained campaign of vilification routinely relying on innuendo and falsehood and often laced with racism...
We are also led to believe that rough stuff from the UK press is only to be expected, and it's part of the royal job to accept it. Don't believe it. Real journalism isn't about dishing out rough stuff. It's about truth and fairness. No journalist anywhere should be asserting...
... that the royal couple have to put up with journalism that is untrue and unfair. No individual, royal or otherwise, should ever have to do that. Journalists should be taking some responsibility for the abuses that have happened...
Instead we are encouraged to think that a 'bad press' for this couple (or for anybody else) is like the British weather – something you have to shrug and put up with. It is not. It is man-made, the deliberate policy of individuals working for corrupt newspaper organisations...
Now we are watching a concerted effort by those organisations to kill off any remaining public sympathy for this vilified royal couple. In their torrent of words they are creating a new normal in which the prince becomes the Duke of Windsor, led astray by a grasping wife...
Or alternatively he is in la-la-land, with no grasp of the financial realities of his own position or of the world. If these views were placed in context they might constitute legitimate opinion, but (surprise!) the context of sustained, dishonest press abuse is always omitted...
We are also constantly reminded that they are privileged and they owe us something. And it's true. But it's the taxpayers who confer the privilege, not the Mail, Sun, Times & Telegraph. They owe nothing to those papers and they can communicate to the public without their help...
There is a special iniquity about the way journalists with no dog in this fight (in broadcast, for example) simply parrot the lines of the corporate press. The fundamental problem to be tackled here, in reality, is not the prince or his wife. It is a hateful, dishonest press.
Here is just one small example of their dishonesty at work: byline.com/column/68/arti…
